On the pro-Catholic slant of the Wall Street Journal

For a newspaper that’s supposed to be non-denominational—and aren’t all news media supposed to be?–the WSJ normalizes Catholicism an awful lot.

Maybe it’s the way I was raised, but the newspapers I read as a kid—the New York Times, New York Post, Journal-American, Herald-Tribune—never took sides among the many religious factions in New York City. They reported the news objectively and impartially. If you ask me, a “newspaper” that favors one particular religion isn’t a real newspaper, it’s a religious broadside. The Wall Street Journal goes out of its way to write frequent, glowing stories about Catholicism, especially on the op-ed pages, which is why I’ve been so critical of it.

I’ve blogged many times about their pro-Catholic slant, as well as that of the Murdoch family’s clone T.V. station, Fox “News” (where the top hosts and executives—Hannity, Cavuto, the disgraced sexual predators Roger Aisles and Bill O’Reilly, Guttfeld, Guilfoyle, Pirro, among others–have been Catholic). The Roman Catholic Church has an outsized presence in America’s ruling culture, spanning not just the Murdoch family’s stranglehold on right wing conservatism, but the U.S. Supreme Court, where until Scalia’s death six of the nine justices were Catholic; today, with Gorsuch, only five are, but Gorsuch, a conservative Christian, hasn’t deviated a whit from Scalia’s reactionary, Catholic biases, nor should we expect him to.

The homophobia of most of these judges has been glaring. Scalia was the worst, in terms of blunt insults, but Roberts, Thomas and Alito are also pretty hateful. Indeed, how could they not be, in view of their church’s official stance on homosexuality? Here it is:

“Persons with a homosexual inclination ought to receive every aid and encouragement to embrace this call personally and fully. This will unavoidably involve much struggle and self-mastery, for following Jesus always means following the way of the Cross.”

“Self-mastery.” Now there’s a laugh. Here’s the Vatican instructing Catholics not to masturbate or otherwise give in to their unnatural lusts—when for centuries this clique has coddled and protected pedophile priests, and continues to do so to this day. “Masturbation remains an intrinsically and gravely disordered action,”the “celibates” in the Vatican remind us, while “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law.”

According to whom? The Pope? Ha ha. It makes me sick, and it should sicken all right-thinking men and women, to consider this nonsense against the background of the child molestation the Catholic Church has encouraged, through its deliberate protection and reassignment of predatory priests.

The latest Catholic propaganda in the Wall Street Journal is an opinion piece by someone named Mary Sherry. She is effulgent in her praise of Catholic priests. Her pastor, she writes, “loves his vocation, projects warmth, and is great with kids.” But I wonder how “great” he would be with a little girl who thinks she was born into the wrong body. I wonder how much “warmth” her priest would project towards two men who wanted to get married in his church. “He’s everything you want in a parish priest,” says Ms. Sherry—if, that is, you’re straight, Republican and homophobic.

But the real howler in Ms. Sherry’s peroration is her unstinting glorification of missionaries. They “inspired…prayer and vocations to religious life” in far-flung places like “Nigeria, Nicaragua and Papua New Guinea. They made us proud,” she declares. Of course, this disingenuousness completely overlooks the historic fact that the missionaries did outrageously cruel and bigoted things to native peoples (paging Junipero Serra), forcing them to abandon their traditional beliefs and installing upon them, against their collective will, a religious sect that was at odds with their customs and beliefs. It’s particularly ironic that Ms. Sherry mentions, among other places blessed by the touch of missionaries, “Boise,” the Idaho city where the Catholic Church instigated the worst “homosexual scandal” in U.S. history, launching a Gestapo-like witch hunt in the 1950s that resulted in prison terms (up to life), suicide, broken families and wrecked livelihoods.

Now, there’s something to “make us proud.”

The Catholic Church may be making slow, hesitant and reluctant progress in cleaning up their anti-gay act, but they have a long way to go. How much longer? Well, it took them 350 years to apologize to Galileo for condemning as “heresy” his correct deduction that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of solar system. Maybe in the year 2367 some future Pope will say he (or she?) is sorry for the persecution, suffering, torture and murder imposed by Rome upon millions of gay people over the centuries. Better late than never, I guess, to “make us proud.”

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Please pray for the counties of Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Solano, which are being ravaged by wildfires.